FROM

Watson’s fugitive days may have ended, but this fight is far from over.

It’s not easy to interview an international fugitive. After encrypted
emails, phone calls from unknown numbers, last minute travel plans
changed—in multiple countries—I eventually found myself sitting across from
Sea Shepherd’s Captain Paul Watson sharing vegan lemon chicken and Szechuan
noodles and talking about desert islands like nothing could be more normal.

For 15 months, the internationally-known environmentalist and star of the
Animal Planet reality show Whale Wars has been on the run. He fled Germany
in July, 2012, because he was facing extradition to Costa Rica, where he was
wanted on charges related to a confrontation with shark-finners on the high
seas in Guatemalan waters. Watson says he could never get a fair trial
there, and his life could be at risk, so he took to the sea.

The anonymous volunteers who helped him called it “Operation Unknown.”
Some started calling it “Operation Where’s Waldo.”

While Watson was on the run, Sea Shepherd’s crew had to prepare for their
latest campaign against Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. The future
of Watson, and the organization, was unknown, but there was no use worrying
about all that, Watson said: “I don’t do stress.”

Watson is known for his speeches, and if there’s one upside of running
for your life it’s the accumulation of new stories. There was the time in
Tonga when he and his crew traded canned goods with villagers for fresh
produce, and then got lured into a free lunch with Mormons. Or when they
steered a Zodiac toward a small island for a camping trip, but didn’t see a
rock wall hidden by waves, flipped, and almost drowned.

There were coconuts. “So many coconuts,” he said. And killer wasps: When
they attacked Watson, he bolted into the jungle and got lost.

On another Pacific island they experimented with kava, a traditional
drink with pyschoactive properties. It didn’t work. “It’s like trying to
drink sawdust that has been filtered through a gym sock,” Watson said.

In my attempts to arrange an interview, I had hoped for a rendezvous at
sea, or at least some coconuts. But I finally caught up with him in Seattle
at one of his favorite restaurants, Bamboo Garden.

A few days before, he found out Interpol’s “Red Notice” had been dropped.
He was no longer wanted. He came ashore in California, and alerted customs.
Watson expected to be stopped and interrogated, but the only question from
customs officers was how they could get some Sea Shepherd T-shirts.

Watson was laughing, and his crew said it’s the happiest they have ever
seen him. He told me about reuniting with his daughter and
18-month-old-grandaughter, who he last saw when she was a month old, and he
was glowing. At one point during dinner, a couple of fans at another table
excitedly said “Hi Paul Watson!” and waved. For a few moments, it felt like
this incognito adventure was over.

Then we stepped outside. There was a new black pickup truck in the
parking lot, covered with Sea Shepherd logos. I jokingly asked him, “Which
car is yours?” He stopped at the edge of the lot, and started the truck’s
engine with a remote control. “I got that to make sure there isn’t a car
bomb,” he said flatly.

Watson’s fugitive days may have ended, but this fight is far from over.

The U.S. chapter of the Sea Shepard Conservation Society, as his group of
sailors who harass illegal whaling boats is officially known, has been mired
in a legal battle with Japanese whalers since March of 2012. Despite
harrowing video showing the whalers attempting to crush the Sea Shepherd’s
Bob Barker between two much larger ships, the whalers say they are the
victims of “extremists” and filed an injunction in U.S. court to stop them.

In a ruling for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Alex Kozinski
agreed and said “you don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch” to be a pirate.
Now Sea Shepherd and its board of directors are trying to prove that they
haven’t violated that injunction with their protests.

“Our support base doesn’t come from the ‘left’ or the ‘right.’ We’re in
front,” Watson says. “The injunction is an attempt to destroy [our
grassroots] support.”

Animal Planet has pulled back on its popular Whale Wars program, and
scaled the series down to a two-hour feature this year.

Watson has been forced to step down from the helm he occupied for 35
years. Much of the court proceedings, which seek over $2 million in
penalties, have been focused on whether or not he actually has pulled back
from the whaling campaign. On one emotional day in court, his daughter Lani
Blazier testified about his decision with tears in her eyes: “This is a man
who gave up pretty much my entire childhood to do what he is doing… The fact
that he’s doing this now shows he’s not taking these charges lightly.”

Right now Sea Shepherd volunteers—sans Captain Watson—are chasing the
whalers out of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. But as they grow more
effective, the backlash from the Japanese is only going to intensify. A
fundraising plea said that “the courtroom battles… are a fight for the very
soul of Sea Shepherd.”

“The future hides in the fog, the present endures,” Watson wrote in a
poem he recently posted to Facebook.

“But at these times I let the wind set the course, knowing that the ship
will carry on as it may.”

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